Easiest:
my @file = <$file>;

Another option:

my @file;
while (<$file>) {
  push(@file, $_);
}
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thanks but if i then print  @file it prints the array fine but removes all the whitespace I wanted to preserve! How can I get around this?

Either the file you are reading doesn't contain the whitespace you think it does or you just can't see it when it prints. ;)

Perhaps you are printing extra newlines?

my @file = <DATA>;
foreach (@file) {
  print $_,".";
}
__DATA__
  2 spaces at the front and 2 spaces at the end
    one tab at the front and one tab at the end    
no spaces at the front or end but 5 spaces before the second     5
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Prints:


  2 spaces at the front and 2 spaces at the end
.    one tab at the front and one tab at the end    
.no spaces at the front or end but 5 spaces before the second     5
.
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When printing try:

foreach $line (@file) {
  print $line."\n";
}
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Alternatively, you could change Mr. Muskrat's code as follows:

my @file;
while (<$file>) {
  push(@file, "$_\n");
}
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Here are some tips to read files:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
@data = <FILEHANDLE> ;
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
chomp(@data); ## this will cut off the \n or \r
              ## in the end of each line.
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open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
my $data ;
1 while( read(FILEHANDLE, $data , 1024*8 , length($data) ) ) ;
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
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This will read line by line:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
while ($line = <FILEHANDLE>) { ... }
close (FILEHANDLE) ;
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If you are trying to open binary files, use binmode() after open:

open (FILEHANDLE,"file.txt") ;
binmode(FILEHANDLE) ;
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In your code you tell that don't want to do $line = $line . $_ ;
This is not a good thing, because you rewrite all the variable for each loop, and is more slow. Do that:

$line .= $_
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$var += 10 ; # $var = $var + 10 ;
$var -= 10 ; # $var = $var - 10 ;
$var *= 10 ; # $var = $var * 10 ;
$var /= 10 ; # $var = $var / 10 ;
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Graciliano M. P.
"The creativity is the expression of the liberty".

# Ugly, I know, but it should work.  The @temp array gets
# overwritten each time through the loop with $_\n.  Then,
# it gets pushed onto the end of the @file array.
while (<$file>) {
  print "$_\n";
  $temp[0] = "$_\n";
  push( @file, @temp);
}
[download]

update (broquaint): added <code> tags